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RIVERSIDE ESSAYS 

EDITED BY 

ADA L. F. SNELL 

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH 
MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE 



Kitersitie (Efigapg 



THE AMERICAN MIND AND AMERICAN IDEALISM. By 
Bliss Perry. 35 cents. 

UNIVERSITY SUBJECTS. By John Henry Newman. 35 
cents. 

STUDIES IN NATURE AND LITERATURE. By John Bur- 
roughs. 35 cents. 

PROMOTING GOOD CITIZENSHIP. By James Bryce. 35 
cents 

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Other titles in preparation 

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aPlie Mbersiit iLttfratutj ^tties 



THE AMERICAN MIND 

AND 

AMERICAN IDEALISM 



BY 

BLISS PERRY 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
HARVARD UNIVERSITY 




l f^eXlfJfg3i<>gPre^ 



BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 



-^6 






COPYRIGHT, I912, BY BLISS PERRY 
COPYRIGHT, I913, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
R. L, S. 224 



CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



^ 



Introduction 

BY ADA L. F. SNELL 

An editorial in the Springfield Republican points 
out that the low standard of American writing 
is due, not to any lack of technical training, but 
to minds made flabby by " soft " courses and 
" lazy trifling with current fiction." Given minds 
of this sort, no amount of technical discipline 
will produce good writing; for, " important as 
it is, and to be encouraged in everyway, formal 
instruction in the art of writing must always 
be secondary to education for wide culture and 
vigorous thinking. Good writing is mainly a 
matter of robust intellectual appetite and di- 
gestion employed upon matters that produce 
self-expression." With the hope that this intel- 
lectual spirit may, to some extent, be cultivated 
by the study of virile modern writers, these 
Riverside Essays have been selected. It is be- 
lieved that the student may be more efl^ectively 
trained in the art of writing by contact with 

[v] 



Introduction 

material, firmly thought out and masterfully ex- 
pressed, than by rhetorical precept. Good read- 
ing will enable him to discover for himself those 
fundamental laws of form which every good 
writer obeys ; and obeys because they simply 
formulate the mind's way of working when it 
works well. Beatrice says in the Paradiso,^^ A\\ 
things whatsoever have order among them- 
selves, and this is the form which makes the 
universe like to God." Form, then, in Dante's 
universe, as in writing, is order. And since no 
right sense of the significance of order can be 
developed by mere " extracts," the whole com- 
position of a writer should be given the student 
for consideration. Only thus can he appreciate 
that "the workman hath in his heart a pur- 
pose." Moreover, the student who masters an 
essay in all its logical setting forth of an idea 
toughens his mind" to grapple with hard books 
and to get pleasure from conquering them 
whether he enjoys them or not." And by means 
of this grappling " his intelligence can be got 
actively at work striking out ideas and setting 
them in order." With the twofold purpose, 
therefore, of developing in the student through 
good reading both a sense of form and also 

[vi] 



Introduction 

mental power, the material in the Riverside 
Essays has been selected. 

The first number, here presented, is by Bliss 
Perry, professor of English Literature at Har- 
vard. Professor Perry's environment and train- 
ing have been almost wholly academic. He 
was born in the college town of Williamstown, 
and is the son of a professor. A graduate of 
Williams College, he studied further at the 
universities of Berlin and Strassburg. Professor 
Perry taught English at Williams and Prince- 
ton, was for several years editor of the Atlan- 
tic Monthly^ and in 1909 was Harvard lecturer 
at the University of Paris. Professor Perry's 
writing is also largely academic in spirit. A 
Study of Prose Fiction is known to all students. 
I^he Amateur Spirit delightfully describes the 
life of a college professor, and tells of such gen- 
tle academic pastimes as fishing with a worm. 
The Park Street Papers^ and indeed all of Pro- 
fessor Perry's writing, is characterized by a gen- 
ial scholarship. His latest book, 'The American 
Mind, from which the two essays here re- 
printed are chosen, is plainly the result of col- 
legiate pursuits. The lectures which constitute 
the volume are, as the author states in the pre- 
[vii] 



Introduction 

face, the E. T. Earl Lectures for 191 2 at the 
Pacific Theological Seminary, Berkeley, Cali- 
fornia. 

The purpose of The American Mind is to 
define and interpret American literature as it 
reflects the characteristic qualities of the Amer- 
ican. In his first Xtcturt^ Race, Nation, and Book^ 
Professor Perry declares that dogmatic brand- 
ings of racial and national traits on a national 
literature are to be made with reservations. For 
example, Keats belongs to no time and Edgar 
Allan Poe to no place. The author furtherques- 
tions the existence of a truly national art any- 
where ; that is, an art " which conveys a trust- 
worthy and adequate expression of the national 
temper as a whole." All our deductions con- 
cerning Japan, based upon the Japanese vases 
and prints, were "smashed to pieces by the 
Russo-Japanese War.*' That literature does 
not express the character of a nation is due to the 
fact that such expression requires a knowledge 
of form such as is possessed only by the poet. 
Lacking a poet, racial experience and national 
emotions are unrecorded. The scholars of the 
Renaissance, recognizing this fact, avowed they 
needed schoolmasters, and were in the right ; for 
[ viii ] 



Introduction 

" no one can paint or compose by nature. One 
must slowly master an art of expression." Lit- 
erature demands " not merely personal distinc- 
tion and power, not merely some uncommon 
height or depth of capacity and insight, but a 
purely artistic training, which in the very na- 
ture of the case is rare." A nation, therefore, is 
not necessarily without ideas and emotions sim- 
ply because no poet has arisen to voice them 
in song. Notwithstanding this, in the literature 
which a nation has produced, the task of the 
critic is to find the national bent of mind. This 
Professor Perry attempts to do in 'The Ameri- 
can Mind^ and by such an analysis prepares the 
reader to understand the elements which make 
a book truly American. 

Briefly summarized, the characteristics of the 
American are belief in the institutions of his 
country, confidence in his powers, recklessness, 
love of oratory, and wonderful energy. " We 
are a nation of immigrants, a digging, hewing, 
building, breeding, bettering race, of mixed 
blood and varying creeds, but of fundamental 
faith in the wages of going on ; a race com- 
pounded of materials crude but potent; raw, 
but with blood that is red and bones that are 
[ix] 



Introduction 

big ; a race that is accomplishing its vital tasks, 
and, little by little, transmuting brute forces and 
material energies into the finer play of the spirit." 
The most characteristic attitude of the Ameri- 
can mind is idealism. Individualism, radicalism, 
and public spirit are other qualities, but the 
dominating one, including the *' ideal passions 
of patriotism, of liberty, of loyalty to home and 
section, of humanitarian and missionary effort," 
is idealism. 

In the next lecture, American Idealism^ Pro- 
fessor Perry defines, with a view which includes 
the varying individualities of our states, the 
ideals of the Americans and the mirroring of 
these in our literature. The material, therefore, 
aflx)rds the student a basis for the estimate of 
the older writers, and furnishes a point of de- 
parture for the judgment and interpretation of 
present-day literary output. Can the student, 
for instance, find evidences of the old ideals in 
the slender volumes of recent poetry? Is heable 
to trace in the prose and poetry of to-day a 
glimmer of" the new idealism which has come 
with the twentieth century: ethical, municipal, 
industrial, and artistic movements which are full 
of promise for the higher life of the country, but 
[x] 



Introduction 

which have not yet had time to express them- 
selves adequately in literature"? 

The lecture, moreover, dealing as it does with 
the school, meeting-house, town, and home as 
the old " Reverences " which inspired our poets, 
is highly suggestive. Our college students, gath- 
ering in the classroom from such varying quar- 
ters, from sterile New England farms and iso- 
lated hill-towns, from our vivid cities east and 
west, bring with them a wealth of experience; 
and still, as in the by-gone days, the warmest, 
deepest feelings are allied with church and 
school, with town and home. On these sub- 
jects the student writes most persuasively. That 
he treats them, in general, imaginatively and 
effectively is probably due to the fact that the 
mere going away from home has engendered a 
certain remoteness of spirit with reference to 
them; already they lie, as Emerson says, "like 
fair pictures in the air.*' These age-old objects 
of reverence are then still rich as literary sub- 
ject-matter.^ 

A study of Professor Perry's method of pre- 

* That even in these days the meeting-house may inspire delicate if 
not profound writing is evidenced by the delightful little sketch in the 
November, 191 2, number of the Atlantic Monthly ^ entitled *' The Order 
of Morning Service." 

[xi] 



Introduction 

senting his material will also be of value to the 
student. Quiet humor, breadth of literary and 
national outlook, and significant illustration vi- 
talize and humanize the abstract theme. Not- 
withstanding the numerous allusions, anecdotes, 
and definitions, the whole is simple, since it is 
fused into organic oneness by that quality of 
stylewhichPatertrenchentlydescribesasMind. 
The readily perceived design, the result of 
Mind, gives strength to the construction, and 
meaning to the decoration ; and according to 
Ruskin these two qualities constitute " the two 
virtues of architecture, its strength, or good con- 
struction, and its beauty, or good decoration.'* 
For structure, for decoration, then, as well as for 
other technical aspects, the student, interested 
in the art of expression, will find the lecture on 
American Idealism valuable aid in the forming 
of his own method of work. 

The remaining lectures of the volume are 
Romance and Reaction^ Humor and Satire^ and 
Individualism and Fellowship. Each, defining 
further the American mind, sets forth the qual- 
ities which are American in our literature. The 
last lecture deals with the early self-seeking of 
the American and the later sense of fellowship. 
[xii] 



Introduction 

The last paragraph sounds a hopeful note, and 
illustrates that faith and that spirit of idealism 
which Professor Perry believes to characterize 
the American nation. The volume closes with 
these words : "We, too, shall outgrow in time 
our questioning, our self-analysis, our futile 
comparison of ourselves with other nations, our 
self-conscious study of our own national char- 
acter. We shall not forget the distinction be- 
tween 'each' and 'all,' but 'all' will increas- 
ingly be placed at the service of 'each.' With 
fellowship based upon individualism, and with 
individualism ever leading to fellowship, Amer- 
ica will perform its vital tasks, and its literature 
will be the unconscious and beautiful utterance 
of its inner life." 



The American Mind 

The origin of the phrase, "the American 
mind," was political. Shortly after the middle 
of the eighteenth century, there began to be a 
distinctly American way of regarding the de- 
batable question of British Imperial control. 
During the period of the Stamp Act agitation 
our colonial-bred politicians and statesmen 
made the discovery that there was a mode of 
thinking and feeling which was native — or 
had by that time become a second nature — 
to all the colonists. Jefferson, for example, 
employs those resonant and useful words " the 
American mind " to indicate that throughout 
the American colonies an essential unity of 
opinion had been developed as regards the 
chief political question of the day. 

It is one of the most striking characteristics 
of the present United States that this instinct of 
political unity should have endured, triumphing 

[ I ] 



The American Mind 

over every temporary motive of division. The 
inhabitants of the United States belong to a 
single political type. There is scarcely a news- 
stand in any country of Continental Europe 
where one may not purchase a newspaper 
openly or secretly opposed to the government, 
— not merely attacking an unpopular admin- 
istration or minister or ruler, — but desiring 
and plotting the overthrow of the entire polit- 
ical system of the country. It is very difficult 
to find such a newspaper anywhere in the 
United States. I myself have never seen one. 
The opening sentence of President Butler*s 
admirable little book, l^he American as He 
Isy originally delivered as lectures before the 
University of Copenhagen, runs as follows : 

"The most impressive fact in American life 
is the substantial unity of view in regard to 
the fundamental questions of government and 
of conduct among a population so large, dis- 
tributed over an area so wide, recruited from 
sources so many and so diverse, living under 
conditions so widely diffisrent.'* 

But the American type of mind is evi- 
dent in many other fields than that of politics. 
The stimulating book from which I have just 

[ ^ ] 



The American Mind 

quoted, attempts in its closing paragraph, after 
touching upon the more salient features of our 
national activity, to define the typical Amer- 
ican in these words : — 

" The typical American is he who, whether 
rich or poor, whether dwelling in the North, 
South, East, or West, whether scholar, pro- 
fessional man, merchant, manufacturer, farmer, 
or skilled worker for wages, lives the life of a 
good citizen and good neighbor ; who believes 
loyally and with all his heart in his country*s 
institutions, and in the underlying principles 
on which these institutions are built ; who 
directs both his private and his public life by 
sound principles; who cherishes high ideals; 
and who aims to train his children for a use- 
ful life and for their country's service." 

This modest and sensible statement indicates 
the existence of a national point of view. We 
have developed in the course of time, as a result 
of certain racial inheritances and historic expe- 
riences, a national "temper" or "ethos"; a 
more or less settled way of considering intel- 
lectual, moral, and social problems ; in short, a 
peculiarly national attitude toward the uni- 
versal human questions. 

I 3 I 



The American Mind 



In a narrower sense, "the American mind"" 
may mean the characteristics of the American in- 
telligence, as it has been studied by Mr. Bryce, 
De Tocqueville, and other trained observers 
of our methods of thinking. It may mean the 
specific achievements of the American intelli- 
gence in fields like science and scholarship and 
history. In all these particular departments of 
intellectual activity the methods and the results 
of American workers have recently received ex- 
pert and by no means uniformly favorable as- 
sessment from investigators upon both sides of 
the Atlantic. But the observer of literary pro- 
cesses and productions must necessarily take a 
somewhat broader survey of national tenden- 
cies. He must study what Nathaniel Haw- 
thorne, with the instinct of a romance writer, 
preferred to call the " heart" as distinguished 
from the mere intellect. He must watch the 
moral and social and imaginative impulses of 
the individual ; the desire for beauty ; the hunger 
for self-expression ; the conscious as well as the 
unconscious revelation of personality ; and he 
must bring all this into relation — if he can, 
and knowing that the finer secrets are sure to 
elude him! — with the age-long impulses of the 

[ 4 ] 



The American Mind 

race and with the mysterious tides of feeling 
that flood or ebb with the changing fortunes of 
the nation. 

yOneway to begin to understand the typical 
American is to take a look at him in Europe. 
It does not require a professional beggar or 
a licensed guide to identify him. Not that the 
American in Europe need recall in any partic- 
ular the familiar pictorial caricature of " Uncle 
Sam.'* He need not bear any outward resem- 
blances to such stage types as that presented in 
" The Man From Home." He need not even 
suggest, by peculiarities of speech or manner, 
that he has escaped from the pages of those 
novels of international observation in which 
Mr. James and Mr. Howells long ago at- 
tained an unmatched artistry. Our " American 
Abroad," at the present hour, may be studied 
without the aid of any literary recollections 
whatever. There he is, with his wife and daugh- 
ters, and one may stare at him with all the 
frankness of a compatriot. He is obviously 
well-to-do, — else he would not be there at 
all, — and the wife and daughters seem very 
well-to-do indeed. He is kindly ; considerate 
— sometimes effusively considerate — of his 

[ S ] 



The American Mind 

fellow travellers ; patient with the ladies of his^ 
family, who in turn are noticeably patient withi 
him. He is genial — very willing to talk withi 
polyglot headwaiters and chauffeurs ; in fact( 
the wife and daughters are also practised con- 
versationalists, although their most loyal ad- 
mirers must admit that their voices are a trifle: 
sharp or flat. These ladies are more widely 
read than "papa." He has not had much lei- 
sure for Ruskin and Symonds and Ferrero. 
His lack of historical training limits his curi- 
osity concerning certain phases of his European ii 
surroundings ; but he uses his eyes well upon 
such general objects as trains, hotel-service, 
and Englishmen. In spite of his habitual gen- 
iality, he is rather critical of foreign ways, 
although this is partly due to his lack of ac- 
quaintance with them. Intellectually, he is 
really more modest and self-distrustful than 
his conversation or perhaps his general bearing 
would imply ; in fact, his wife and daughters, 
emboldened very likely by the training of their 
women's clubs, have a more commendable 
daring in assaulting new intellectual positions. 
Yet the American does not lack quickness, 
either of wits or emotion. His humor and sen- 

[ 6 ] 



The American Mind 

timent make him an entertaining companion. 
Even when his spirits run low, his patriotism 
is sure to mount in proportion, and he can al- 
ways tell you with enthusiasm in just how many 
days he expects to be back again in what he 
calls " God*s country." 

This, or something like this, is the "Ameri- 
can " whom the European regards with curios- 
ity, contempt, admiration, or envy, as the case 
may be, but who is incontestably modifying 
Western Europe, even if he is not, as many 
journalists and globe-trotters are fond of assert- 
ing, "Americanizing" the world. Interesting 
as it is to glance at him against that European 
background which adds picturesqueness to his 
qualities, the " Man from Home " is still more 
interesting in his native habitat. There he has 
been visited by hundreds of curious and observ- 
ant foreigners, who have left on record a whole 
literature of bewildered and bewildering, irritat- 
ing and flattering and amusing testimony con- 
cerningthe Americans. Settlers like Crevecoeur 
in the glowing dawn of the Republic, poets like 
Tom Moore, novelists like Charles Dickens, — 
other novelists like Mr. Arnold Bennett, — 
professional travellers like Captain Basil Hall, 

[ 7 ] 



The American Mind I 

students of contemporary sociology like Pau' 
Bourget and Mr. H. G. Wells, French jourii 
nalists, German professors, Italian admirers oil 
Colonel Roosevelt, political theorists like Dc 
Tocqueville, profound and friendly observen 
like Mr. Bryce, have had, and will continue td 
have, their say. 

The reader who tries to take all this testi- 
mony at its face value, and to reconcile its con- 
tradictions, will be a candidate for the insanezl 
asylum. Yet the testimony is too amusing to)| 
be neglected and some of it is far too importantt 
to be ignored. Mr. John Graham Brooks, after- 
long familiarity with these foreign opinions of 
America, has gathered some of the most repre- 
sentative of them into a delightful and stimu- 
lating volume entitled As Others See Us, There 
one may find examples of what the foreigner 
has seen, or imagined he has seen, during his 
sojourn in America, and what he has said 
about it afterwards. Mr. Brooks is too char- 
itable to our visitors to quote the most fan- 
tastic and highly colored of their observations ; 
but what remains is sufficiently bizarre. 

The real service of such a volume is to train 
us in discounting the remarks made about us in 

[ 8 ] 



The American Mind 

a particular period like the eighteen-thirties, or 
from observations made in a special place, like 
Newport, or under special circumstances, like a 
Bishop's private car. It helps us to make allow- 
ances for the inevitable angle of nationality, the 
equally inevitable personal equation. A recent 
ambitious book on America, by a Washington 
journalist of long residence here, although of 
foreign birth, declares that " the chief trait of 
the American people is the love of gain and the 
desire of wealth acquired through commerce.*' 
That is the opinion of an expert observer, who 
has had extraordinary chances for seeing pre- 
cisely what he has seen. I think it, notwith- 
standing, a preposterous opinion, fully as pre- 
posterous as Professor Muensterberg's notion 
that America has latterly grown more monarch- 
ical in it^ tendencies, — but I must remember 
that, in my own case, as in that of the journalist 
under consideration, there are allowances to be 
made for race, and training, and natural idiosyn- 
cracy of vision. 

The native American, it may be well to re- 
member, is something of an observer himself. 
If his observations upon the characteristics 
of his countrymen are less piquant than the 

[ 9 ] 



The American Mind 

foreigner's, it is chiefly because the American 
writes, upon the whole, less incisively than he 
talks. But incisive native writing about Ameri- 
can traits is not lacking. If a missionary, say ini 
South Africa, has read the New York Natiom 
every week for the past forty years, he has hadl 
an extraordinary "moving picture" of Amer- 
ican tendencies, as interpreted by indepen- 
dent, trenchant, and high-minded criticism. 
That a file of the Nation will convey precisely 
the same impression of American tendencies 
as a file of the Sun^ for instance, or the Boston 
Evening 'Transcript, is not to be affirmed. The 
humor of the London Punch and the New 
York Life does not differ more radically than 
the aspects of American civilization as viewed 
by two rival journals in Newspaper Row. The 
complexity of the material now collected and 
presented in daily journalism is so great that 
adequate editorial interpretation is obviously 
impossible. All the more insistently does this 
heterogeneous picture of American life demand 
the impartial interpretation of the historian, the 
imaginative transcription of the novelist. Hu- 
morist and moralist, preacher and mob orator 
and social essayist, shop-talk and talk over the 
[ lo] 



The American Mind 

tea-cup or over the pipe, and the far more il- 
luminating instruction of events, are fashioning 
day by day the infinitely delicate processes of 
our national self-assessment. Scholars like Mr. 
Henry Adams or Mr. James Ford Rhodes will 
explain to us American life as it was during the 
administrations of Jefferson or in theeighteen- 
fifties. Professor Turner will expound the sig- 
nificance of the frontier in American history. 
Mr. Henry James will portray with unrivalled 
psychological insight the Europeanized Amer- 
ican of the eighteen-seventies and eighties. Lit- 
erary critics like Professor Wendell or Professor 
Trent will deduce from our literature itself evi- 
dence concerning this or that national quality; 
and all this mass of American expert testimony, 
itself a result and a proof of national self-aware- 
ness and self-respect, must be put into the scales 
to balance, to confirm, or to outweigh the re- 
ports furnished by foreigners. 

I do not pretend to be able, like an expert 
accountant, to draw up a balance-sheet of na- 
tional qualities, to credit or debit the Amer- 
ican character with this or that precise quantity 
of excellence or defect. But having turned the 
pages of many books about the United States, 



The American Mind 

and listened to many conversations about its 
inhabitants in many states of the Union, I ven- 
ture to collect a brief list of the qualities which 
have been assigned to us, together with a few, 
but not, I trust, too many, of our admitted 
national defects. 

Like that excellent German who wrote the 
History of the English Drama in six volumes, 
I begin with Physical Geography. The differ- 
entiation of the physical characteristics of our 
branch of the English race is admittedly due, 
in part, to climate. In spite of the immense 
range of climatic variations as one passes from 
New England to New Orleans, from the Miss- 
issippi Valley to the high plains of the Far 
West, or from the rainy Oregon belt south- 
ward to San Diego, the settlers of English 
stock find a prevalent atmospheric condition, 
as a result of which they begin, in a generation 
or two, to change in physique. They grow 
thinner and more nervous, they "lean for- 
ward," as has been admirably said of them, 
"while the Englishman " leans back " ; they are 
less heavy and less steady; their voices are 
higher, sharper; their athletes get more easily 
" on edge "; they respond, in short, to an exces- 



The American Mind 

sively stimulating climate. An old-fashioned 
sea-captain put it all into a sentence when he 
said that he could drink a bottle of wine with 
his dinner in Liverpool and only a half a bottle 
in New York. Explain the cause as we may, 
the fact seems to be that the body of John 
Bull changes, in the United States, into the 
body of Uncle Sam. 

There are mental differences no less pro- 
nounced. No adjective has been more fre- 
quently applied to the Anglo-Saxon than the 
word " dull." The American mind has been 
accusedof ignorance, superficiality, levity,com- 
monplaceness, and dozens of other defects, but 
"dulness" is not one of them. "Smartness,'* 
rather, is the preferred epithet of derogation ; 
or, to rise a little in the scale of valuation, it is 
the word " cleverness," used with that lurking 
contempt for cleverness which is truly English 
and which long survived in the dialect of New 
England, where the village ne'er-do-well or 
Jack-of-all-trades used to be pronounced a 
" clever " fellow. The variety of employments 
to which the American pioneers were obliged 
to betake themselves has done something, no 
doubt, to produce a national versatilitv,a quick 

[ ^3] 



The American Mind 

assimilation of new methods and notions, a 
ready adaptability to novel emergencies. An 
invaluable pioneer trait is curiosity ; the settler 
in a new country, like Moses in the wilderness 
of Arabia, must " turn aside to see " ; he must 
look into things, learn to read signs, — or else 
the Indians or frost or freshet will soon put an 
end to his pioneering. That curiosity concern- 
ing strangers which so much irritated Dickens 
and Mrs. Trollope was natural to the children 
of Western emigrants to whom the difference 
between Sioux and Pawnee had once meant 
life or death. " What 's your business, stranger, 
in these parts ? " was an instinctive, because it 
had once been a vital, question. That it degen- 
erates into mere inquisitiveness is true enough ; 
just as the "acuteness," the "awareness," es- 
sential to the existence of one generation be- 
comes only" cuteness," the typical tin-pedler's 
habit of mind, in the generation following. 

American inexperience, the national rawness 
and unsophistication which has impressed so 
many observers, has likewise its double sig- 
nificance when viewed historically. We have 
exhibited, no doubt, the amateurishness and 
recklessness which spring from relative isola- 

[ H] 



The American Mind 

tlon, from ignorance as to how they manage 
elsewhere this particular sort of thing, — the 
conservation of forests, let us say, or the gov- 
ernment of colonial dependencies. National 
smugness and conceit, the impatience crystal- 
lized in the phrase, " What have we got to do 
with abroad ? '* have jarred upon the nerves of 
many cultivated Americans. But it is no less 
true that a nation of pioneers and settlers, like 
the isolated individual, learns certain rough- 
and-ready Robinson Crusoe ways of getting 
things done. A California mining-camp is sure 
to establish law and order in due time, though 
never, perhaps, a law and order quite accord- 
ing to Blackstone. In the most trying crises of 
American political history, it was not, after all, 
a question of profiting by European experi- 
ence. Washington and Lincoln, in their sorest 
struggles, had nothing to do with "abroad'*; 
the problem had first to be thought through, 
and then fought through, in American and not 
in European terms. Not a half-dozen English- 
men understood the bearings of the Kansas- 
Nebraska Bill, or, if they did, we were little the 
wiser. We had to wait until a slow-minded 
frontier lawyer mastered it in all its implica- 

[ 15] 



The American Mind' 

tionSj and then patiently explained it to the 
farmers of Illinois, to the United States, and 
to the world. 

It is true that the unsophisticated mode of 
procedure may turn out to be sheer folly, — 
a " sixteen to one " triumph of provincial bar- 
barism. But sometimes it is the secret of fresh- 
ness aad of force. Your cross-country runner 
scorns the highway, but that is because he has 
confidence in his legs and loins, and he likes 
to take the fences. Fenimore Cooper, when 
he began to write stories, knew nothing about 
the art of novel-making as practised in Eu- 
rope, but he possessed something infinitely 
better for him, namely, instinct, and he took 
the right road to the climax of a narrative as 
unerringly as the homing bee follows its view- 
less trail. 

No one can be unaware how easily this 
superb American confidence may turn to over- 
confidence, to sheer recklessness. We love to 
run past the signals, in our railroading and in 
our thinking. Emerson will "plunge" on a 
new idea as serenely as any stock-gambler ever 
" plunged " in Wall Street, and a pretty school- 
teacher will tell you that she has become an 
[ i6 ] 



The American Mind 

advocate of the " New Thought " as compla- 
cently as an old financier will boast of having 
bought Calumet and Hecla when it was sell- 
ing at 25. (Perhaps the school-teacher may get 
as good a bargain. I cannot say.) Upon the 
whole, Americans back individual guesswork 
and pay cheerfully when they lose. A great 
many of them, as it happens, have guessed 
right. Even those who continue to guess 
wrong, like Colonel Sellers, have the indefeas- 
ible romantic appetite for guessing again. The 
American temperament and the chances of 
American history have brought constant tempt- 
ation to speculation, and plenty of our people 
prefer to gamble upon what they love to call 
a " proposition," rather than to go to the 
bottom of the facts. They would rather spec- 
ulate than know. 

Doubtless there are purely physical causes 
that have encouraged this mental attitude, 
such as the apparently inexhaustible resources 
of a newly opened country, the conscious- 
ness of youthful energy, the feeling that any 
very radical mistake in pitching camp to-day 
can easily be rectified when we pitch camp 
to-morrow. The habit of exaggeration which 

[ '7 ] 



fe 



The American Mind 

was so particularly annoying to English vis- 
itors in the middle of the last century — annoy- 
ing even to Charles Dickens, who was him- 
self something of an expert in exuberance — 
is a physical and moral no less than a mental 
quality. That monstrous braggadocio which 
Dickens properly satirized in Martin Chuz- 
zlewit was partly, of course, the product of 
provincial ignorance. Doubtless there were, 
and there are still, plenty of Pograms who are 
convinced that Henry Clay and Daniel Web- 
ster overtop all the intellectual giants of the 
Old World. But that youthful bragging, and 
perhaps some of the later bragging as well, has 
its social side. It is a perverted idealism. It 
springs from group loyalty, from sectional 
fidelity. The settlement of " Eden " may be 
precisely what Dickens drew it : a miasmatic 
mud-hole. Yet we who are interested in the 
new town do not intend, as the popular phrase 
has it, "to give ourselves away." We back 
our own " proposition," so that to this day 
Chicago cannot tell the truth to St. Louis, nor 
Harvard to Yale. Braggadocio thus gets glori- 
fied through its rootage in loyalty; and like- 
wise extravagance — surely one of the worst 

[i8] 



The American Mind 

of American mental vices — is often based 
upon a romantic confidence in individual opin- 
ion or in the righteousness of some specific 
cause. Convince a blue-blooded American like 
Wendell Phillips that the abolition of slavery- 
is right, and, straightway, words and even facts 
become to him mere weapons in a splendid 
warfare. His statements grow rhetorical, reck- 
less, virulent. Proof seems to him, as it did to 
the contemporary Transcendentalist philoso- 
phers, an impertinence. The sole question is, 
" Are you on the Lord's side ? '* i.e., on the 
side of Wendell Phillips. 

Excuse as we may the faults of a gifted 
combatant in a moral crisis like the abolition 
controversy, the fact remains that the intel- 
lectual dangers of the oratorical temperament 
are typically American. What is common- 
ly called our " Fourth of July " period has 
indeed passed away. It has few apologists, 
perhaps fewer than it really deserves. It is 
possible to regret the disappearance of that 
old-fashioned assertion of patriotism and pride, 
and to question whether historical pageants 
and a "noiseless Fourth" will develop any 
better citizens than the fathers were. But on 

[ 19] 



The American Mind 

the purely intellectual side, the influence of 
that spread-eagle oratory was disastrous. 
Throughout wide-extended regions of the 
country, and particularly in the South and 
West, the "orator" grew to be, in the pop- 
ular mind, the normal representative of intel- 
lectual abihty. Words, rather than things, 
climbed into the saddle. Popular assemblies 
were taught the vocabulary and the logic of 
passion, rather than of sober, lucid reasoning. 
The " stump " grew more potent than school- 
house and church and bench ; and it taught 
its reckless and passionate ways to more than 
one generation. The intellectual leaders of the 
newer South have more than once suffered 
ostracism for protesting against this glorifica- 
tion of mere oratory. But it is not the South 
alone that has suffered. Wherever a mob can 
gather, there are still the dangers of the old 
demagogic vocabulary and rhetoric. The mob 
state of mind is lurking still in the excitable 
American temperament. 

The intellectual temptations of that temper- 
ament are revealed no less in our popular jour-^ 
nalism. This journalism, it is needless to say, 
is extremely able, but it is reckless to the last 

[20] 



The American Mind 

degree. The extravagance of its head-lines and 
the over-statements of its news columns are 
direct sources of profit, since they increase the 
circulation and it is circulation which wins 
advertising space. I think it is fair to say that 
the American people, as a whole, like precisely 
the sort of journalism which they get. The 
tastes of the dwellers in cities control, more 
and more, the character of our newspapers. 
The journals of New York, Chicago, and San 
Francisco are steadily gaining in circulation, in 
resourcefulness, and in public spirit, but they 
are, for the most part, unscrupulous in attack, 
sophistical, and passionate. They outvie the 
popular pulpit in sentimentality. They play 
with fire. 

The note of exaggeration which is heard in 
American oratory and journalism is struck 
again in the popular magazines. Their com- 
paign of " exposure," during the last decade, 
has been careless of individual and corporate 
rights and reputations. Even the magazine 
sketches and short stories are keyed up to a 
hysteric pitch. So universally is this character- 
istic national tension displayed in our period- 
ical literature that no one is much surprised to 
[ai ] 



The American Mind 

read in his morning paper that some one has 
called the President of the United States a liar, 
— or that some one has been called a liar by 
the President of the United States. 

For an explanation of these defects, shall we 
fall back upon a convenient maxim of De 
Tocqueville*s and admit with him that "a de- 
mocracy is unsuited to meditation"? We are 
forced to do so. But then comes the inevitable 
second thought that a democracy must needs 
have other things than meditation to attend to. 
Athenian and Florentine and Versailles types 
of political despotism have all proved highly 
favorable to the lucubrations of philosophers 
and men of letters who enjoyed the despot's 
approbation. For that matter, no scheme of 
life was ever better suited to meditation than 
an Indian reservation in the eighteen-seven- 
ties, with a Great Father in Washington to fur- 
nish blankets, flour, and tobacco. Yet that is 
not quite the American ideal of existence, and 
it even failed to produce the peaceable fruits 
of meditation in the Indian himself. 

One may freely admit the shortcomings of 
the American intelligence; the "commonness 
of mind and tone" which Mr Bryce believes 

[.2] 



The American Mind 

to be inseparable from the presence of such 
masses of men associated under modern de- 
mocratic government ; the frivolity and extra- 
vagance which represent the gasconading of the 
romantic temper in face of the grey practical- 
ities of everyday routine; the provincial boast- 
fulness and bad taste which have resulted from 
intellectual isolation ; the lack, in short, of a 
code, whether for thought or speech or beha- 
vior. And nevertheless, one's instinctive Amer- 
icanism replies. May it not be better, after 
all, to have gone without a code for a while, to 
have lacked that orderly and methodized and 
socialized European intelligence, and to have 
had the glorious sense of bringing things to 
pass in spite of it? There is just one thing that 
would have been fatal to our democracy. It is 
the feeling expressed in La Bruyere*s famous 
book: "Everything has been said, everything 
has been written, everything has been done." 
Here in America everything was to do ; we 
were forced to conjugate our verbs in the fu- 
ture tense. No doubt our existence has been, 
in some respects, one of barbarism, but it has 
been the barbarism of life and not of death. A 
rawboned baby sprawling on the mud floor 

[23 ] 



The American Mind 

of a Kentucky log cabin is a more hopeful 
spectacle than a wholly civilized funeral. 

" Perhaps it is,'* rejoins the European critic, 
somewhat impatiently, " but you are confusing 
the issue. We find certain grave defects in the 
American mind, defects which, if you had not 
had what Thomas Carlyle called * a great deal 
of land for a very few people,* would long ago 
have involved you in disaster. You admit the 
mental defects, but you promptly shift the 
question to one of moral qualities, of practical 
energy, of subduing your wilderness, and so 
forth. You have too often absented yourself 
from the wedding banquet, from the European 
symposium of wit and philosophy, from the 
polished and orderly and delightful play and 
interplay of civilized mind, — and your excuse 
is the old one : that you are trying your yoke 
of oxen and cannot come. We charge you with 
intellectual sins, and you enter the plea of 
moral preoccupation. If you will permit per- 
sonal examples, you Americans have made ere 
now your national heroes out of men whose 
reasoning powers remained those of a college 
sophomore, who were unable to state an oppo- 
nent's position with fairness,who lacked wholly 

[24] 



The American Mind 

the judicial quality, who were vainglorious and 
extravagant, who had, in short, the mind of an 
exuberant barbarian ; but you instantly forget 
their intellectual defects in the presence of their 
abounding physical and moral energy, their 
freedom from any taint of personal corruption, 
their whole-souled desire and effort for the 
public good. Were not such heroes, impossi- 
ble as they would have been in any other civ- 
ilized country, perfectly illuminative of your 
national state of mind?" 

For one, I confess that I do not know what 
reply to make to my imaginary European critic. 
I suspect that he is right. At any rate, we stand 
here at the fork of the road. If we do not wish to 
linger any longer over a catalogue of intellectual 
sins, let us turn frankly to our moral preoccu- 
pations, comforting ourselves, if we like, as we 
abandon the field of purely intellectual rivalry 
with Europe, in the reflection that it is the 
muddle-headed Anglo-Saxon, after all, who is 
the dominant force in the modern world. 

The moral temper of the American people 
has been analyzed no less frequently than their 
mental traits. Foreign and native observers are 
alike agreed in their recognition of the extra- 

[25] 



The American Mind 

ordinary American energy. The sheer power 
of the American bodily machine, driven by the 
American will, is magnificent. It is often driven 
too hard, and with reckless disregard of any- 
thing save immediate results. It wears out more 
quickly than the bodily machine of the English- 
man. It is typical that the best distance runners 
of Great Britain usually beat ours, while we beat 
them in the sprints. Our public men are fre- 
quently — as "the athletes say — "all in " at 
sixty. Their energy is exhausted at just the time 
that many an English statesman begins his best 
public service. But after making every allow- 
ance for wasteful excess, for the restless and im- 
patient consumption of nervous forces which 
nature intended that we should hold in reserve, 
the fact remains that American history has de- 
monstrated the existence of a dynamic national 
energy, physical and moral, which is still un- 
abated. Immigration has turned hitherward the 
feet of millions upon millions of young men 
from the hardiest stocks of Europe. They re- 
plenish the slackening streams of vigor. When 
the northern New Englander cannot make a 
living on the old farm, the French Canadian 
takes it off his hands, and not only improves 
[0.6] 



The American Mind 

the farm, but raises big crops of boys. So with 
Italians, Swedes, Germans, Irish, Jews, and 
Portuguese, and all the rest. We are a nation 
of immigrants, a digging, hewing, building, 
breeding, bettering race, of mixed blood and 
varying creeds, but of fundamental faith in the 
wages of going on ; a race compounded of ma- 
terials crude but potent ; raw, but with blood 
that is red and bones that are big ; a race that is 
accomplishing its vital tasks, and, little by little, 
transmuting brute forces and material energies 
into the finer play of mind and spirit. 
. From the very beginning, the American 
people have been characterized by idealism. It 
was the inner light of Pilgrim and Quaker col- 
onists ; it gleams no less in the faces of the child- 
ren of Russian Jew immigrants to-day. Amer- 
ican irreverence has been noted by many a for- 
eign critic, but there are certain subjects in 
whose presence our reckless or cynical speech 
is hushed. Compared with current Continental 
humor, our characteristic American humor is 
peculiarly reverent. The purity of woman and 
the reality of religion are not considered topics 
for jocosity. Cleanness of body and of mind are 
held by our young men to be not only desirable 

[27], 



The American Mind 

but attainable virtues. There is among us, in 
comparison with France or Germany, a defect- 
ive reverence for the State as such ; and a 
positive irreverence towards the laws of the 
Commonwealth, and towards the occupants of 
high political positions. Mayor, Judge, Gov- 
ernor, Senator, or even President, may be the 
butt of such indecorous ridicule as shocks or 
disgusts the foreigner; but nevertheless the 
personal joke stops short of certain topics which 
Puritan tradition disapproves. The United 
States is properly called a Christian nation, 
not merely because the Supreme Court has so 
affirmed it, but because the phrase " a Christ- 
ian nation'* expresses the historical form which 
the religious idealism of the country has made 
its own. The Bible is still considered, by the 
mass of the people, a sacred book ; oaths in 
courts of law, oaths of persons elected to great 
office, are administered upon it. American 
faith in education, as all the world knows, has 
from the beginning gone hand in hand with 
faith in religion ; the school-house was almost 
as sacred a symbol as the meeting-house ; and 
the munificence of American private benefac- 
tions to the cause of education furnishes to- 
[28], 



( 



The American Mind 



day one of the most striking instances of ideal- 
ism in the history of civilization. 

The ideal passions of patriotism, of liberty, 
of loyalty to home and section, of humanitarian 
and missionary effort, have all burned with a 
clear flame in the United States. The optim- 
ism which lies so deeply embedded in the 
American character is one phase of the na- 
tional mind. Charles Eliot Norton once said 
to me, with his dry humor, that there was an 
infallible test of the American authorship of 
any anonymous article or essay : " Does it con- 
tain the phrase 'After all, we need not des- 
pair* ? If it does, it was written by an Amer- 
ican." In spite of all that is said about the 
practicality of the American, his love of gain 
and his absorption in material interests, those 
who really know him are aware how habitually 
he confronts his practical tasks in a spirit of 
romantic enthusiasm. He marches downtown 
to his prosaic day's job and calls it "playing 
the game " ; to work as hard as he can is to 
"get into the game," and to work as long as 
he can is to "stay in the game " ; he loves to 
win fully as much as the Jew and he hates to 
lose fuDy as much as the Englishman, but 

[^9] 



The American Mind i 

losing or winning, he carries into his business 
activity the mood of the IdeaHst. 

It is easy to think of all this as self-decep- 
tion ; as the emotional effusiveness of the 
American temperament ; but to refuse to see 
Its idealism is to mistake fundamentally the 
character of the American man. No doubt he 
does deceive himself often as to his real mo- 
tives : he is a mystic and a bargain-hunter by 
turns. Divided alms, confused ideals, have 
struggled for the mastery among us, ever since 
Challon's Voyage^ in 1606, announced that the 
purpose of the first colonists to Virginia was 
"both to seek to convert the savages, as also 
to seek out what benefits or commodities 
might be had in those parts." How that 
" both " — " as also " keeps echoing in Amer- 
ican history : " both " to christianize the Negro 
and work him at a profit, " both " duty and 
advantage in retalnlngthe Philippines; "both'* 
international good will and increased arma- 
ments ; " both " Sunday morning precepts and 
Monday morning practice ; " both " horns of 
a dilemma ; " both God and mammon " ; did 
ever a nation possess a more marvellous 
water-tight compartment method of believing 

[30] 



The American Mind 

and honoring opposites ! But in all this un- 
conscious hypocrisy the American is perhaps 
not worse — though he may be more absurd! 
— than other men. 

Another aspect of the American mind Is 
found In our radicahsm. " To be an Amer- 
ican," It has been declared, "Is to be a radical." 
That statement needs qualification. Intellect- 
ually the American is inclined to radical views; 
he is willing to push certain social theories 
very far; he will found a new religion, a new 
philosophy, a new socialistic community, at 
the slightest notice or provocation; but he has 
at bottom a fund of moral and political con- 
servatism. Thomas Jefferson, one of the great- 
est of our radical idealists, had a good deal of 
the English squire in him after all. Jefferson- 
ianlsm endures, not merely because It is a rad- 
ical theory of human nature, but because it 
expresses certain facts of human nature. The 
American mind looks forward, not back ; but 
in practical details of land, taxes, and govern- 
mental machinery we are instinctively cautious 
of change. The State of Connecticut knows 
that her constitution is ill adapted to the pre- 
sent conditions of her population, but the dif- 

[31 ]. 



The American Mind 

ficulty is to persuade the rural legislators to 
amend it. Yet everybody admits that amend- 
ment will come "some day." This admission 
is a characteristic note of American feeling; 
and every now and then come what we call 
" uplift " movements, when radicalism is in 
the very air, and a thousand good " causes " 
take fresh vigor. 

One such period was in the New England 
of the eighteen-forties. We are moving in a 
similar — only this time a national — current 
of radicalism, to-day. But a change in the 
weather or the crops has before now turned 
many of our citizens from radicalism into con- 
servatism. There is, in fact, conservatism in 
our blood and radicalism in our brains, and 
now one and now the other rules. Very typ- 
ical of American radicalism is that story of the 
old sea-captain who was ignorant, as was sup- 
posed, of the science of navigation, and who 
cheerfully defended himself by saying that he 
could work his vessel down to Boston Light 
without knowing any navigation, and after that 
he could go where he "dum pleased." I sus- 
pect the old fellow pulled his sextant and 
chronometer out of his chest as soon as he 

[32] 



The American Mind 

really needed them. American radicalism is 
not always as innocent of the world^s expe- 
rience as it looks. In fact, one of the most 
interesting phases of this twentieth century 
" uplift " movement is its respect and even 
glorification of expert opinion. A German ex- 
pert in city-planning electrifies an audience of 
Chicago club-women by talking to them about 
drains, ash-carts, and fiower-beds. A hundred 
other experts, in sanitation, hygiene, chemis- 
try, conservation of natural resources, govern- 
ment by commission, tariffs, arbitration treat- 
ies, are talking quite as busily ; and they have 
the attention of a national audience that is 
listening with genuine modesty, and with a real 
desire to refashion American life on wiser and 
nobler plans. In this national forward move- 
ment in which we are living, radicalism has 
shown its beneficent aspect of constructive 
idealism. 

No catalogue of American qualities and de- 
fects can exclude the trait of individualism. 
We exalt character over institutions, says Mr. 
Brownell ; we like our institutions because they 
suit us, and not because we admire institutions. 
" Produce great persons," declares Walt Whit- 

\.33 ] 



The American Mind 

man, " the rest follows/' Whether the rest fol- 
lows or not, there can be no question that 
Americans, from the beginning, have laid sin- 
gular stress upon personal qualities. The relig- 
ion and philosophy of the Puritans were in 
this respect at one with the gospel of the fron- 
tier. It was the principle of "every man for 
himself'*; solitary confrontation of his God, 
solitary struggle with the wilderness. " He 
that will not work," declared John Smith after 
that first disastrous winter at Jamestown, 
" neither let him eat." The pioneer must 
clear his own land, harvest his own crops, 
defend his own fireside; his temporal and 
eternal salvation were strictly his own affair. 
He asked, and expected, no aid from the com- 
munity; he could at most "change works" 
in time of harvest, with a neighbor, if he had 
one. It was the sternest school of self-reliance, 
from babyhood to the grave, that human 
society is ever likely to witness. It bred he- 
roes and cranks and hermits ; its glories and 
its eccentricities are written in the pages of 
Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman; they are 
written more permanently still in the instinct- 
ive American faith in individual manhood, 

[34] 



The American Mind ' 

Our democracy Idolizes a few individuals ; it 
Ignores their defective training, or, it may be, 
their defective culture; it likes to think of an 
Andrew Jackson who was a " lawyer, judge, 
planter, merchant, general, and politician," be- 
fore he became President; it asks only that the 
man shall not change his individual character 
in passing from one occupation or position to 
another ; in fact. It is amused and proud to 
think of Grant hauling cordwood to market, of 
Lincoln keeping store or Roosevelt round- 
ing-up cattle. The one essential question was 
put by Hawthorne into the mouth of Holgrave 
in the House of the Seven Gables. Holgrave had 
been by turns a schoolmaster, clerk in a store, 
editor, pedler, lecturer on Mesmerism, and 
daguerreotypist, but " amid all these personal 
vicissitudes," says Hawthorne, " he had never 
lost his identity. . . . He had never violated 
the innermost man, but had carried his con- 
science along with him." There speaks the 
local accent of Puritanism, but the voice Insist- 
ing upon the moral integrity of the individual 
is the undertone of America. 

Finally, and surely not the least notable of 
American traits, is public spirit. Triumphant 

[35 ] 



The American Mind 

individualism checks itself, or is rudely checked I 
in spite of itself, by considerations of the gen- 
eral good. How often have French critics con- 
fessed, with humiliation, that in spite of the 
superior socialization of the French intelligence, 
France has yet to learn from America the art 
and habit of devoting individual fortunes to 
the good of the community. Our American 
literature, as has been already pointed out, is 
characteristically a citizen literature, responsive 
to the civic note, the production of men who, 
like the writers of the Federalist, applied a vig- 
orous practical intelligence, a robust common 
sense, to questions affecting the interest of 
everybody. The spirit of fair play in our free 
democracy has led Americans to ask not merely 
what is right and just for one, the individual, 
but what are righteousness and justice and fair 
play for all. Democracy, as embodied in such 
a leader as Lincoln, has meant Fellowship. 
Nothing finer can be said of a representative 
American than to say of him, as Mr. Norton 
said of Mr. Lowell, that he had a " most pub- 
lic soul." 

No one can present such a catalogue of 
American qualities as I have attempted without 

[ 36 ] 



The American Mind 

realizing how much escapes his classification. 
Conscious criticism and assessment of national 
characteristics is essential to an understanding 
of them ; but one feels somehow that the net is 
not holding. The analysis of English racial in- 
heritances, as modified by historical conditions, 
yields much, no doubt ; but what are we to say 
of such magnificent embodiments of the Amer- 
ican spirit as are revealed in the Swiss immi- 
grant Agassiz, the German exile Carl Schurz, 
the native-born mulatto Booker Washington ? 
The Americanism of representative Americans 
is something which must be felt ; it is to be 
reached by imaginative perception and sym- 
pathy, no less than by the process of formal 
analysis. It would puzzle the experts in racial 
tendencies to find arithmetically the common 
denominator ofsuch American figures as Frank- 
lin, Washington, Jackson, Webster, Lee, Lin- 
coln, Emerson, and " Mark Twain " ; yet the 
countrymen of those typical Americans instinct- 
ively recognize in them a sort of largeness, 
genuineness, naturalness, kindliness, humor, 
effectiveness, idealism, which are indubitably 
and fundamentally American. 

There are certain sentiments of which we 

[37] 



I 



The American Mind 

ourselves are conscious, though we can scarcely 
translate them into words, and these vaguelyi 
felt emotions of admiration, of effort, of fellow- 
ship and social faith are the invisible America. 
Take, for a single example, the national admira- 
tion for what we call a " self-made " man : here; 
is a boy selling candy and newspapers on a: 
Michigan Central train; he makes up his mind: 
to be a lawyer ; in twelve years from that day; 
he is general counsel for the Michigan Central] 
road ; he enters the Senate of the United Statess 
and becomes one of its leading figures. The in-i 
stinctive flush of sympathy and pride with which! 
Americans listen to such a story is far mores 
deeply based than any vulgar admiration fon 
money-making abilities. No one cares whether! 
such a man is rich or poor. He has vindicated 
anew the possibilities of manhood under Amer- 
ican conditions of opportunity ; the miracle of 
our faith has in him come true once more. 

No one can understand America with his 
brains. It is too big, too puzzling. It tempts, 
and it deceives. But many an illiterate immi- 
grant has felt the true America in his pulses 
before he ever crossed the Atlantic. The de- 
scendant of the Pilgrims still remains ignorant 

[38] 



The American Mind 

of our national life if he does not respond to its 
glorious zest, its throbbing energy, its forward 
urge, its uncomprehending belief in the future, 
its sense of the fresh and mighty world just 
beyond to-day's horizon. Whitman's " Pio- 
neers, O Pioneers " is one of the truest of 
American poems because it beats with the pulse 
of this onward movement, because it is full of 
this laughing and conquering fellowship and 
of undefeated faith. 



I 



American Idealism 

Our endeavor to state the general character- 
istics of the American mind has already given 
us some indication of what Americans really 
care for. The things or the qualities which 
they like, the objects of their conscious or un- 
conscious striving, are their ideals. "There 
is what I call the American idea," said Theo- 
dore Parker in the Anti-Slavery Convention 
of 1850. "This idea demands, as the proxim- 
ate organization thereof, a democracy — that 
is, a government of all the people, by all the 
people, for all the people; of course, a govern- 
ment on the principle of eternal justice, the 
unchanging law of God ; for shortness* sake, I 
will call it the idea of Freedom." That is one 
of a thousand definitions of American idealism. 
Books devoted to the "Spirit of America " — 
like the volume by Henry van Dyke which 
bears that very title — give a programme of 

[40] 



American Idealism 

national accomplishments and aspirations. But 
our immediate task is more specific. It is to 
point out how adequately this idealistic side of 
the national temperament has been expressed 
in American writing. Has our literature kept 
equal pace with our thinking and feeling ? 

We do not need, in attempting to answer 
this question, any definition of idealism, in its 
philosophical or in its more purely literary 
sense. There are certain fundamental human 
sentiments which lift men above brutes, French- 
men above " frog-eaters," and Englishmen 
above " shop-keepers." These ennobling senti- 
ments or ideals, while universal in their essen- 
tial nature, assume in each civilized nation a 
somewhat specific coloring. The national lit- 
erature reveals the myriad shades and hues of 
private and public feeling, and the more truth- 
ful this literary record, the more delicate and 
noble become the harmonies of local and na- 
tional thought or emotion with the universal 
instincts and passions of mankind. On the 
other hand, when the literature of Spain, for 
instance, or of Italy, fails, within a given period, 
in range and depth of human interest, we are 
compelled to believe either that the Spain or 

[41 ] 



American Idealism 

Italy of that age was wanting in the nobler 
ideals, or that it lacked literary interpretation. 

In the case of America we are confronted by 
a similar dilemma. Since the beginning of the 
seventeenth century this country has been, in 
a peculiar sense, the home of idealism ; but our 
literature has remained through long periods 
thin and provincial, barren in cosmopolitan 
significance; and the hard fact faces us to-day 
that only three or four of our writers have 
aroused any strong interest in the cultivated 
readers of continental Europe. Evidently, then, 
either the torch of American idealism does not 
burn as brightly as we think, or else our writ- 
ers, with but few exceptions, have not hitherto 
possessed the height and reach and grasp to 
hold up the torch so that the world could see 
it. Let us look first at the flame, and then at 
the torch-bearers. 

Readers of Carlyle have often been touched 
by the humility with which that disinherited 
child of Calvinism speaks of Goethe*s doctrine 
of the "Three Reverences," as set forth in Wil- 
helm Meister. Again and again, in his corre- 
spondence and his essays, does Carlyle recur 
to that teaching of the threefold Reverence : 

[42] 



American Idealism 

Reverence for what is above us, for what is 
around us and for what is under us; that is to 
say, the ethnic religion which frees us from de- 
basing fear, the philosophical religion which 
unites us with our comrades, and the Christian 
religion which recognizes humility and poverty 
and suffering as divine. 

"To which of these religions do you speci- 
ally adhere ?" inquired Wilhelm. 

" To all the three," replied the sages ; " for 
in their union they produce what may properly 
be called the true Religion. Out of those three 
Reverences springs . the highest Reverence, 
Reverence for Oneself." 

An admirable symbolism, surely; vaguer, 
no doubt, than the old symbols which Carlyle 
had learned in the Kirk at Ecclefechan, but 
less vague, in turn, than that doctrine of rever- 
ence for the Oversoul, which was soon to be 
taught at Concord. 

As one meditates upon the idealism of the 
first colonists in America, one is tempted to ask 
what their " reverences " were. Toward what 
tangible symbols of the invisible did their eyes 
instinctively turn ? 

For New England, at least, the answer is 

[43 ] 



American Idealism 

relatively simple. One form of it is contained 
in John Adams's well-known prescription for 
Virginia, as recorded in his Diary for July 21, 
1786. "Major Langbourne dined with us 
again. He was lamenting the difference of char- 
acter between Virginia and New England. I 
offered to give him a receipt for making a New 
England in Virginia. He desired it ; and I re- 
commended to him town-meetings, training- 
days, town-schools, and ministers." 

The " ministers," it will be noticed, come 
last on the Adams list. But the order of pre- 
cedence is unimportant. 

Here are four symbols, or, if you like, "re- 
verences." Might not the Virginia planters, 
loyal to their own specific symbol of the " gen- 
tleman," — no unworthy ideal, surely; one 
that had been glorified in European literature 
ever since Castiligione wrote his Courtier, and 
one that had been transplanted from England 
to Virginia as soon as Sir Walter Raleigh*s men 
set foot on the soil which took its name from 
the Virgin Queen, — might not the Virginia 
gentlemen have pondered to their profit over 
the blunt suggestion of the Massachusetts com- 
moner ? No doubt ; and yet how much pictur- 

[44] 



American Idealism 

esqueness and nobility — and tragedy, too — 
we should have missed, if our history had not 
been full of these varying symbols, clashing 
ideals, different Reverences! 

One Reverence, at least, was common to the 
Englishman of Virginia and to the Englishman 
of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. They 
were joint heirs of the Reformation, children of 
that waxing and puissant England which was a 
nation of one book, the Bible; a book whose 
phrases color alike the Faerie ^een of Spen- 
ser and the essays of Francis Bacon; a book 
rich beyond all others in human experience ; 
full of poetry, history, drama; the test of con- 
duct ; the manual of devotion ; and above all, 
and blinding all other considerations by the 
very splendor of the thought, a book believed 
to be the veritable Word of the unseen God. 
For these colonists in the wilderness, as for the 
Protestant Europe which they had left irrevo- 
cably behind them, the Bible was the plainest 
of all symbols of idealism: it was the first of 
the " Reverences." 

The Church was a symbol likewise, but to 
the greater portion of colonial America the 
Church meant chiefly the tangible band of 

[ 45 ] 



American Idealism 

militant believers within the limits of a certain 
township or parish, rather than the mystical 
Bride of Christ. Except in Maryland and Vir- 
ginia, whither the older forms of Church wor- 
ship were early transplanted, there was scanty 
reverence for the Establishment. There was 
neither clergyman nor minister on board the 
Mayflower. In Rufus Choate's oration on the 
Pilgrims before the New England Society of 
New York in 1843, occurred the famous sen- 
tence about "a church without a bishop and a 
state without a King " ; to which Dr. Wain- 
wright, rector of St. John*s, replied wittily at 
the dinner following the oration that there 
" can be no church without a bishop." This is 
perhaps a question for experts ; but Thomas 
Hooker, Thomas Shepard, and John Cotton 
would have sided with Rufus Choate. The awe 
which had once been paid to the Establishment 
was transferred, in the seventeenth-century 
New Enorland, to the minister. The minister 
imposed himself upon the popular imagination, 
partly through sheer force of personal ascend- 
ency, and partly as a symbol of the theocracy, 
— the actual governing of the Commonwealth 
by the laws and spirit of the sterner Scriptures, 

[46] 



American Idealism 

The minister dwelt apart as upon an awful 
Sinai. It was no mere romantic fancy of Haw- 
thorne that shadowed his countenance with a 
black veil. The church organization, too, — 
though it may have lacked its bishop, — had 
a despotic power over its communicants ; to be 
cast out of its fellowship involved social and 
political consequences comparable to those fol- 
lowing excommunication by the Church of 
Rome. Hawthorne and Whittier and Long- 
fellow — all of them sound antiquarians, 
though none of them in sympathy with the 
theology of Puritanism — have described in 
fit terms the bareness of the New England 
meeting-house. What intellectual severity and 
strain was there; what prodigality of learning; 
what blazing intensity of devotion ; what pathos 
of women's patience, and of children, prema- 
turely old, stretched upon the rack of insoluble 
problems! What dramas of the soul were 
played through to the end in those barn-like 
buildings, where the musket, perhaps, stood in 
the corner of the pew ! " How aweful is this 
place ! " must have been murmured by the 
lips of all ; though there were many who have 
added, " This is the gate of Heaven." 

[47] 



American Idealism 

The gentler side of colonial religion is win- 
ningly portrayed in Whittier's Pennsylvania 
Pilgrim and in his imaginary journal of Mar- 
garet Smith. There were sunnier slopes, warmer 
exposures for the ripening of the human spirit, 
in the Southern colonies. Even in New Eng- 
land there was sporadic revolt from the begin- 
ning. The number of non-church-members in- 
creased rapidly after 1700; Franklin as a youth 
in Boston admired Cotton Mather's ability, but 
he did not go to church, " Sunday being my 
studying day." Doubtless there were always 
humorous sceptics like Mrs. Stowe's delight- 
ful Sam Lawson in Oldtown Folks, Lawson's 
comment on Parson Simpson's service epitom- 
izes two centuries of New England thinking. 
*' Wal," said Sam, " Parson Simpson's a smart 
man ; but I tell ye, it 's kind o' discouragin'. 
Why, he said our state and condition by natur 
was just like this. We was clear down in a well 
fifty feet deep, and the sides all round nothin' 
but glare ice ; but we was under immediate ob- 
ligations to get out, 'cause we was free, volun- 
tary agents. But nobody ever had got out, and 
nobody would, unless the Lord reached down 
and took 'em. And whether he would or not 

[48] 



American Idealism' 

nobody could tell ; it was all sovereignty. He 
said there wan't one in a hundred, not one in 
a thousand, — not one in ten thousand, — that 
would be saved. Lordy massy, says I to myself, 
ef that 's so they 're any of 'em welcome to my 
chance. And so I kind o* ris up and come outJ^ 

Mrs. Stowe's novel is fairly representative 
of a great mass of derivative literature which 
draws its materials from the meeting-house 
period of American history. But the direct lit- 
erature of that period has passed almost wholly 
into oblivion. Jonathan Edwards had one of 
the finest minds of his century; no European 
standard of comparison is too high for him ; he 
belongs with Pascal, with Augustine, if you like, 
with Dante. But his great treatises written in 
the Stockbridge woods are known only to a few 
technical students of philosophy. One terrible 
sermon, preached at Enfield in 1741, is still 
read by the curious ; but scarcely anybody knows 
of the ineffable tenderness, dignity, and pathos 
of his farewell sermon to his flock at North- 
ampton: and the Yale Library possesses nearly 
twelve hundred of Edwards's sermons which 
have never been printed at all. Nor does any- 
body, save here and there an antiquarian, read 

[49] 



American Idealism 

Shepard and Hooker and Mayhew. And yet 
these preachers and their successors furnished 
the emotional equivalents of great prose and 
verse to generations of men. "That is poetry," 
says Professor Saintsbury (in a dangerous lat- 
itudinarianism, perhaps!), "which gives the 
reader the feeling of poetry." Here we touch 
one of the fundamental characteristics of our 
national state of mind, in its relation to litera- 
ture. We are careless of form and type, yet we 
crave the emotional stimulus. Milton, greatest 
of Puritan poets, was read and quoted all too 
seldom in the Puritan colonies, and yet those 
colonists were no strangers to the emotions of 
sublimity and awe and beauty. They found 
them in the meeting-house instead of in a book; 
precisely as, in a later day, millions of Ameri- 
cans experienced what was for them the emo- 
tional equivalent of poetry in the sermons of 
Henry Ward Beecher and Phillips Brooks. 
French pulpit oratory of the seventeenth cent- 
ury wins recognition as a distinct type of liter- 
ature; its great practitioners, like Massillon,, 
Bourdaloue, Bossuet, are appraised in all the 
histories of the national literature and in books; 
devoted to the evolution of literary species. In 

[ so] 



American Idealism 

the American colonies the great preachers per- 
formed the functions of men of letters without 
knowing it. They have been treated with too 
scant respect in the histories of American lit- 
erature. It is one of the penalties of Protest- 
antism that the audiences, after a while, out- 
grow the preacher. The development of the 
historic sense, of criticism, of science, makes an 
impassable gulf between Jonathan Edwards 
and the American churches of the twentieth 
century. A sense of profound changes in theo- 
logy has left our contemporaries indifferent to 
the literature in which the old theology was 
clothed. 

There is one department of American liter- 
ary production, of which Bossuet's famous ser- 
mon on Queen Henrietta Maria of England 
may serve to remind us, which illustrates sig- 
nificantly the national idealism. I mean the 
commemorative oration. The addresses upon 
the Pilgrim Fathers by such orators as Everett, 
Webster, and Choate; the countless orations 
before such organizations as the New England 
Society of New York and the Phi Beta Kappa; 
the papers read before historical and patriotic 
societies ; the birthday and centenary discourses 

[ SI ] 



1 



American Idealism 

upon national figures like Washington or Lin- 
coln, have all performed, and are still perform- 
ing, an inestimable service in stimulating popu- 
lar loyalty to the idealism of the fathers. Asi 
literature, most of this production is derivative : 
we listen to eloquence about the Puritans, but 
we do not read the Puritans ; the description 
of Arthur Dimmesdale's election sermon in 
The Scarlet Letter, moving as it may be, tempts 
no one to open the stout collections of election 
sermons in the libraries. Yet the original liter- 
ature of'mediaeval chivalry is known only to 
a few scholars : Tennyson's Idylls outsell the 
Mabinogion and Malory. The actual world of 
literature is always shop-worn ; a world chiefly 
of second-hand books, of warmed-over emo- 
tions ; and it is not surprising that many listen- 
ers to orations about Lincoln do not personally 
emulate Lincoln, and that jnany of the most 
enthusiastic dealers in the sentiment of the an- 
cestral meeting-house do not themselves attend 
church. 

The other ingredients of John Adams's ideal 
Commonwealth are no less significant of our 
national disposition. Take the school-house. 
It was planted in the wilderness for the training 



American Idealism 

of boys and girls and for a future "godly and 
learned ministry." The record of American 
education is a long story of idealism which has 
touched literature at every turn. The "red 
school-house'* on the hill-top or at the cross- 
roads, the "log-colleges" in forgotten hamlets, 
the universities founded by great states, are all 
a record of the American faith — which has 
sometimes been called a fetich — in education. 
In its origin, it was a part of the essential pro- 
gramme of Calvinism to make a man able to 
judge for himself upon the most momentous 
questions ; a programme, too, of that political 
democracy which lay embedded in the tenets 
of Calvinism, a democracy which believes and 
must continue to believe that an educated elect- 
orate can safeguard its own interests and train 
up its own leaders. The poetry of the Ameri- 
can school-house was written long ago by Whit- 
tier, in describing Joshua Coffin's school under 
the big elm on the cross-road in East Haver- 
hill ; its humor and pathos and drama have been 
portrayed by innumerable story-writers and es- 
sayists. Mrs. Martha Baker Dunn's charming 
sketches, entitled " Cicero in Maine " and " Vir- 
gil in Maine," indicate the idealism once taught 

[53 J 



American Idealism 

in the old rural academies, — and it is taught 
there still. City men will stop wistfully on the 
street, in the first week of September, to watch 
the boys and girls go trudging off to their first 
day of school ; men who believe in nothing else 
at least believe in that ! And school and college 
and university remain, as in the beginning, the 
first garden-ground and the last refuge of liter- 
ature. 

That "town-meeting'* which John Adams 
thought Virginia might do well to adopt has, 
likewise become a symbol of American ideal- I 
ism. Together with the training-day, it repre- 
sented the rights and duties and privileges of , 
free men ; the machinery of self-government. J 
It was democracy, rather than " representative " ' 
government,underitspurestaspect. Sentiments ; 
of responsibility to the town, the political unit,, 
and to the Commonwealth, the group of units,, 
were bred there. Likewise, it was a training- 
school for sententious speech and weighty 
action; its roots, as historians love to demon- 
strate, run back very far; and though the modern i 
drift to cities has made its machinery ineffective 
in the larger communities, it remains a perpet- 
ual spring or feeding stream to the broader cur- 

[54] 



American Idealism 

rents of our national life. Without an under- 
standing of the town-meeting and its equiv- 
alents, our political literature loses much of its 
significance. Like the school-house and meet- 
ing-house, it has become glorified by our men 
of letters. John Fiske and other historians 
have celebrated it in some of the most bril- 
liant pages of our political writing; and that 
citizen literature, so deeply characteristic of us, 
found in the plain, forthright, and public-spir- 
ited tone of town-meeting discussions its key- 
note. The spectacular debates of our national 
history, the dramatic contests in the great arena 
of the Senate Chamber, the discussions before 
huge popular audiences in the West, have main- 
tained the civic point of view, have developed 
and dignified and enriched the prose style first 
employed by American freemen in deciding 
their local aifairs in the presence of their neigh- 
bors. " I am a part of this people,'* said Lin- 
coln proudly in one of his famous debates of 
1858; "I was raised just a little east of here "; 
and this nearness to the audience, this directness 
and simplicity andgenuineness of our best polit- 
ical literature, its homely persuasiveness and 
force, is an inheritance of the town-meeting. 

[55] 



American Idealism 

Bible and meeting-house, school-house and 
town-meeting, thus illustrate concretely the 
responsiveness of the American character to 
idealistic impulses. They are external symbols 
of a certain state of mind. It may indeed be 
urged that they are primarily signs of a moral 
and social or institutional trend, and are there- 
fore non-literary evidence of American ideal- 
ism. Nevertheless, institutional as they may be 
deemed, they lie close to that poetry of daily 
duty in which our literature has not been poor. 
They are fundamentally related to that atti- 
tude of mind, that habitual temper of the spirit, 
which has produced, in all countries of settled 
use and wont, the literature of idealism. Bru- 
netiere said of Flaubert's most famous woman 
character that poor Emma Bovary, the prey 
and the victim of Romantic desires, was after 
all much like the rest of us except that she 
lacked the intelligence to perceive the charm 
and poetry of the daily task. We have already 
touched upon the purely romantic side of 
American energy and of American imagina- 
tion, and we must shortly look more closely 
still at those impulses of daring, those moods 
of heightened feeling, that intensified individ- 

[ 56 ] ■ 



American Idealism 

ualism, the quest of strangeness and terror and 
wild beauty, which characterize our romantic 
writing. But this romanticism is, as it were, a 
segment of the larger circle of idealism. It is 
idealism accentuated by certain factors, driven 
to self-expression by the passions of scorn or 
of desire ; it exceeds, in one way or another, 
the normal range of experience and emotion. 
Our romantic American literature is doubtless 
our greatest. And yet some of the most char- 
acteristic tendencies of American writing are to 
be found in the poetry of daily experience, in 
the quiet accustomed light that falls upon one's 
own doorway and garden, in the immemorial 
charm of going forth to one's labor and return- 
ing in the evening, — poetry old as the world. 

Let us see how this glow of idealism touches 
some of the more intimate aspects of human ex- 
perience. " Out of the three Reverences," says 
Wilhelm Meister, "springs the highest Re- 
verence, Reverence for Oneself." Open the 
pages of Hawthorne. Moving wholly within 
the framework of established institutions, with 
no desire to shatter the existing scheme of 
social order, choosing as its heroes men of the 

C S7 I 



American Idealism 

meeting-house, town-meeting, and training- 
day, how intensely nevertheless does the imag- 
ination of this fiction-writer illuminate the Body 
and the Soul! 

Take first the Body. The inheritance of 
English Puritanism may be traced throughout 
our American writing, in its reverence for phys- 
ical purity. The result is something unique in 
literary history. Continental critics, while re- 
cognizing the intellectual and artistic powers 
revealed in 'The Scarlet Letter, have seldom 
realized the awfulness, to the Puritan mind, 
of the very thought of an adulterous minister. 
That a priest in southern Europe should break 
his vows is indeed scandalous ; but the sin is re- 
garded as a failure of the natural man to keep 
a vow requiring supernatural grace for its ful- 
filment; it may be that the priest had no voca- 
tion for his sacred office ; he is unfrocked, pun- 
ished, forgotten, yet a certain mantle of human 
charity still covers his offisnce. But in the Pur- 
itan scheme (and The Scarlet Letter, save for 
that one treacherous, warm human moment in 
the woodland where "all was spoken," lies 
wholly within the set framework of Puritan- 
ism) there is no forgiveness for a sin of the 

[58] 



American Idealism 

flesh. There is only Law, Law stretching on 
into infinitude until the mind shudders at it. 
Hawthorne knew his Protestant New England 
through and through. T^be Scarlet Letter is the 
most striking example in our national literature 
of that idealization of physical purity, but hun- 
dreds of other romances and poems, less mor- 
bid if less great, assert in unmistakable terms 
the same moral conviction, the same ideal. 

Yet, in spite of its theme, there was never a 
less adulterous novel than this book which plays 
so artistically with the letter A. The body is 
branded, is consumed, is at last, perhaps, trans- 
figured by the intense rays of light emitted from 
the suffering soul. 

** The soul is form and doth the body make.'* 

In this intense preoccupation with the Soul, 
Hawthorne's romance is in unison with the 
more mystical and spiritual utterances of Cath- 
olicism as well as of Protestantism. It was in 
part a resultant of that early American isola- 
tion which contributed so effectively to the art- 
istic setting of T^he Scarlet Letter, But in his 
doctrine of spiritual integrity. In the agonized 
utterance, "Be true — be true !'* as well as in 

[59] 



American Idealism 

his reverence for purity of the body, our great- 
est romancer was typical of the imaginative Ht- 
erature of his countrymen. The restless artistic 
experiments of Poe presented the human body 
in many a ghastly and terrifying aspect of ill- 
ness and decay, and distorted by all passions 
save one. His imagination was singularly sex- 
less. Pathological students have pointed out 
the relation between this characteristic of Poe's 
writing, and his known tendencies toward opi- 
um-eating, alcoholism, and tuberculosis. But 
no such explanation is at hand to elucidate the 
absence of sexual passion from the novels of 
the masculine-minded Fenimore Cooper. One 
may say, indeed, that Cooper's novels, like 
Scott's, lack intensity of spiritual vision ; that 
their tone is consonant with the views of a sound 
Church of England parson in the eighteenth 
century; and that the absence of physical pas- 
sion, like the absence of purely spiritual insight, 
betrays a certain defect in Cooper's imaginative 
grasp and depth. But it is better criticism, after 
all, to remember that these three pioneers in 
American fiction-writing were composing for 
an audience in which Puritan traditions or tastes 
were predominant. Not one of the three men 

[60] 



American Idealism 

but would have instantly sacrificed an artistic 
effect, legitimate in the eyes of Fielding or 
Goethe or Balzac, rather than — in the phrase 
so often satirized — " bring a blush to the cheek 
of innocence." In other words, the presence 
of a specific audience, accustomed to certain 
Anglo-Saxon and Puritanic restraint of topic 
and of speech, has from the beginning of our 
imaginative literature cooperated with the in- 
stinct of our writers. That Victorian reticence 
which is so plainly seen even in such full-bodied 
writers as Dickens or Thackeray — a reticence 
which men like Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. 
Galsworthy and Mr. Wells think so hypocrit- 
ical and dangerous to society and which they 
have certainly done their utmost to abolish — 
has hitherto dominated our American writing. 
The contemporary influence of great Conti- 
nental writers to whom reticence is unknown, 
combined with the influence of a contemporary 
opera and drama to which reticence would be 
unprofitable, are now assaulting this dominant 
convention. Very possibly it is doomed. But 
it is only within recent years that its rule has 
been questioned. 

One result of it may, I think, be fairly ad- 
- [6i ] 



American Idealism 

mitted. While very few writers of eminence,, 
after all, in any country, wish to bring a " blush 
to the cheek of innocence," they naturally wish, 
as Thackeray put it in one of the best-known 
of his utterances, to be permitted to depict a 
man to the utmost of their power. American 
literary conventions, like English conventions, 
have now and again laid a restraining and com- 
pelling handupon the legitimate exercise of this 
artistic instinct ; and this fact has cooperated 
with many social, ethical, and perhaps physio- 
logical causes to produce a thinness or blood- I 
lessness in our books. They are graceful, pleas- I 
ing, but pale, like one of those cool whitish 
uncertain skies of an American spring. They 
lack " body," like certain wines. It is not often 
that we can produce a real Burgundy. We have 
hadmanydistinguishedfiction-writers, but none 
with the physical gusto of a Fielding, a Smol- 
lett, or even a Dickens, who, idealist and ro- 
manticist as he was, and Victorian as were his 
artistic preferences, has this animal life which 
tingles upon every page. We must confess that 
there is a certain quality of American idealism 
which is covertly suspicious or openly hostile to 
the glories of bodily sensation. Emerson's thin 

[62] . 



American Idealism 

high shoulders peep up reproachfully above the 
desk ; Lanier is playing his reproachful flute ; 
Longfellow reads Fremont's Rocky Mountain 
experiences whilelyingabed,andsighs "But, ah, 
the discomforts!"; Irvmg's j4 scoria, superb as 
were the possibilitiesofits physical background, 
tastes like parlor exploration. Even Dana's 
Before the Mast and Parkman's Oregon I'rail^ 
transcripts of robust actual experience, and ad- 
mirable books, reveal a sort of physical paleness 
compared with TurgenieflF's Notes of a Sports- 
man and Tolstoi's Sketches of Sebastopol and 
the Crimea. They are Harvard undergraduate 
writing, after all! 

These facts illustrate anew that standing 
temptation of the critic of American literature to 
palliate literary shortcomings by the plea that we 
possess certain admirable non-literary qualities. 
The dominant idealism of the nation has levied, 
or seemed to levy, a certain tax upon our writ- 
ing. Some instincts, natural to the full-blooded 
utterance of Continental literature, have been 
starved oreliminated here. Very well. The char- 
acteristic American retort to this assertion would 
be: Better our long record and habit of ideal- 
ism than a few masterpieces more or less. As a 

l(>z ] 



American Idealism 

people, we have cheerfully accepted the Puritar 
restraintof speechjwehave respectedthe shames 
faced conventions of decentand social utterance 
Like the men and women described in Locke 
Lampson's verses, Americans 

** eat, and drink, and scheme, and plod,— 
They go to church on Sunday; 
And many are afraid of God — 
And more of Mrs. Grundy.** 

Now Mrs. Grundy is assuredly not the most de^; 
sirable of literary divinities, but the student ofj 
classical literature can easily think of other di-j 
vinities, celebrated in exquisite Greek and Ro- 
man verse, who are distinctly less desirable still.j 
" Not passion, but sentiment," said Haw-^ 
thorne, in a familiar passage of criticism of: 
his own T^wice-Told Tales. How often must thcj 
student of American literature echo that half--, 
melancholy but just verdict, as he surveys thei 
transition from the spiritual intensity of a fewof ' 
our earlier writers to the sentimental qualities; 
which have brought popular recognition to the; 
many. Take the word "soul" itself Calvinism 
shadowed and darkened the meaning, perhaps, 
and yet its spiritual passion made the word 
"soul " sublime. The reaction against Calvin- 

[64] 



American Idealism 

ism has made religion more human, natural, 
and possibly more Christlike, but "soul" has 
lost the thrilling solemnity with which Edwards 
pronounced the word. Emerson and Haw- 
thorne, far as they had escaped from the bonds 
of their ancestral religion, still utter the word 
"soul" with awe. But in the popular ser- 
mon and hymn and story of our day, — with 
their search after the sympathetic and the senti- 
mental, after what is called in magazine slang 
"heart-interest," — the word has lost both its 
intellectual distinction and its literary magic. 
It will regain neither until it is pronounced 
once more with spiritual passion. 

But in literature, as in other things, we must 
take what we can get. The great mass of our 
American writing is sentimental, because it has 
been produced by, and for, an excessively senti- 
mental people. The poems in Stedman's care- 
fully chosen Anthology^ the prose and verse 
in the two volume Stedman-Hutchinson col- 
lection of American Literature, the Library of 
Southern Literature, and similar sectional an- 
thologies, the school Readers and Speakers, 
— particularly in the half-century between 
1830 and 188O5 — our newspapers and maga- 

[65] 



American Idealism 

zines, — particularly the so-called "yellow** 
newspapers and the illustrated magazines typi- 
fied by Harper s Monthly, — are all fairly drip- 
ping with sentiment. American oratory is noto- 
riously the most sentimental oratory of the 
civilized world. The Congressional Record still 
presents such specimens of sentiment — de- 
livered or given leave to be printed, it is true, 
for "home consumption *' rather than to affect 
the course of legislation — as are inexplicable to 
an Englishman or a Frenchman or an Italian. 
Immigrants as we all are, and migratory as 
we have ever been, — so much so that one 
rarely meets an American who was born in 
the house built by his grandfather, — we cling 
with peculiar fondness to the sentiment of 
"Home." The best-known American poem, 
for decades, was Samuel Woodworth*s " Old 
Oaken Bucket," the favorite popular song was 
Stephen Foster's " My Old Kentucky Home," 
the favorite play was Denman Thompson's 
" Old Homestead." Without that appealing 
word "mother "the American melodrama would 
be robbed of its fifth act. Without pictures of 
" the child " the illustrated magazines would go 
into bankruptcy. No country has witnessed 
[66] 



American Idealism 

such a production of periodicals and books for 
boys and girls: France and Germany imitate 
in vain The Youth' s Companion and St, NicbolaSy 
as they did the stories of "Oliver Optic" and 
Little Women and Little Lord Fauntleroy. 

The sentimental attitude towards women and 
children, which is one of the most typical as- 
pects of American idealism, is constantly illus- 
trated in our short stories. Bret Harte, disci- 
ple of Dickens as he was, and Romantic as was 
his fashion of dressing up his miners and gam- 
blers, was accurately faithful to the American 
feeling towards the "kid" and the "woman." 
*' Tennessee's Partner," " The Luck of Roar- 
ing Camp," " Christmas at Sandy Bar," are ob- 
vious examples. Owen Wister's stories are 
equally faithful and admirable in this matter. 
The American girl still does astonishing things 
in international novels, as she has continued 
to do since the eighteen-sixties, but they are 
astonishing mainly to the European eye and 
against the conventionalized European back- 
ground. She does the same things at home, 
and neither she nor her mother sees why she 
should not, so universal among us is the chiv- 
alrous interpretation of actions and situations 

[67] 



American Idealism 

which amaze the European observer. The pop- 
ular American literature which recognizes and 
encourages this position of the " young girl " 
in our social structure is a literature primarily 
of sentiment. The note of passion — in the Eu- 
ropean sense of that word — jars and shatters 
it. The imported "problem-play," written for 
an adult public in Paris or London, introduces 
social facts and intellectual elements almost 
wholly alien to the experience of American 
matinee audiences. Disillusioned historians of 
our literature have instanced this unsophistica- 
tion as a proof of our national inexperience ; 
yet it is often a sort of radiant and triumphant 
unsophistication which does not lose its inno- 
cence in parting with its ignorance. 

That sentimental idealization of classes, 
whether peasant, bourgeois, or aristocratic, 
which has long been a feature of Continental 
and English poetry and fiction, is practically 
absent from American literature. Whatever the 
future may bring, there have hitherto been no 
fixed classes in American society. Webster was 
guilty of no exaggeration when he declared that 
the whole North was made up of laborers, 
and Lincoln spoke in the same terms in his 
[68] 



American Idealism 

well-known sentences about " hired laborers ": 
" twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer/' 
The relative uniformity of economic and social 
conditions, which prevailed until toward the 
close of the nineteenth century, made, no 
doubt, for the happiness of the greatest num- 
ber, but it failed, naturally, to afford that pic- 
turesqueness of class contrast and to stimulate 
that sentiment of class distinction, in which 
European literature is so rich. 

Very interesting, in the light of contempo- 
rary economic conditions, is the effort made by 
American poets in the middle of the last cent- 
ury to glorify labor. They were not so much 
idealizing a particular laboring class, as en- 
deavoring, in Whitman's words, " To teach the 
average man the glory of his walk and trade." 
Whitman himself sketched the American work- 
man in almost every attitude which appealed 
to his own sense of the picturesque and heroic. 
But years before Leaves of Grass was published, 
Whittier had celebrated in his Songs of Labor 
the glorified images of lumberman and drover, 
shoemaker and fisherman. Lucy Larcom and 
the authors of The Lowell Offering portrayed 
the fine idealism of the young women — of the 

[ 69 ] 



American Idealism 

best American stock — who went enthusiastic- 
ally to work in the cotton-mills of Lowell and 
Lawrence, or who bound shoes by their own 
firesides on the Essex County farms. That glow 
of enthusiasm for labor was chiefly moral, but 
it was poetical as well. The changes which have 
come over the economic and social life of Amer- 
ica are nowhere more sharply indicated than in 
that very valley of the Merrimac where, sixty 
and seventy years ago, one could " hear Amer- 
ica singing.*' There are few who are singing to- 
day in the cotton-mills; the operators, instead 
of girls from the hill-farms, are Greeks, Lithu- 
anians, Armenians, Italians. Whittier's drovers 
have gone forever; the lumbermen and deep- 
sea fishermen have grown fewer, and the men 
who still swing the axes and haul the frozen 
cod-lines are mostly aliens. The pride that once 
broke into singing has turned harsh and silent. 
" Labor" looms vast upon the future political 
and social horizon, but the songs of labor have 
lost the lyric note. They have turned into, the 
dramas and tragedies of labor, as portrayed 
with the swift and fierce insistence of the short 
story, illustrated by the Kodak. In the great 
agricultural sections of the West and South the 

[70] 



American Idealism 

old bucolic sentiment still survives, — that sim- 
ple joy of seeing the " frost upon the pumpkin *' 
and " the fodder in the stock " which Mr. James 
Whitcomb Riley has sung with such charming 
fidelity to the type. But even on the Western 
farms toil has grown less manual. It is more a 
matter of expert handling of machinery. Reap- 
ing and binding may still have their poet, but 
he needs to be a Kipling rather than a Burns. 

Our literature, then, reveals few traces of 
idealization of a class, and but little idealization 
of trades or callings. Neither class nor calling 
presents anything permanent to the American 
imagination, or stands for anything ultimate in 
American experience. On the other hand, our 
writing is rich in local sentiment and sectional 
loyalty. The short story, which has seized so 
greedily the more dramatic aspects of Amer- 
ican energy, has been equally true to the quiet 
background of rural scenery and familiar ways. 
American idealism, as shown in the transform- 
ation of the lesser loyalties of home and coun- 
tryside into the larger loyalties of state and 
section, and the absorption of these, in turn, 
into the emotions of nationalism, is particularly 
illustrated in our political verse. A striking 

[71 ] 



American Idealism 

example of the imaginative visualization of the 
political units of a state is the spirited roll-call 
of the counties in Whittier*s " Massachusetts 
to Virginia." But the burden of that fine poem, 
after all, is the essential unity of Massachusetts 
as a sovereign state, girding herself to repel the 
attack of another sovereign state, Virginia. Now 
the evolution of our political history, both lo- 
cal and national, has tended steadily, for half a 
century, to the obliteration, for purposes of the 
imagination, of county lines within state lines. 
At the last Republican state convention held 
in Massachusetts, there were no county banners 
displayed, for the first time in half a century. 
Many a city-dweller to-day cannot tell in what 
county he is living unless he has happened to 
make a transfer of real estate. State lines them- 
selves are fading away. The federal idea has 
triumphed. Doubtless the majority of the fel- 
low citizens of John Randolph of Roanoke were 
all the more proud of him because the poet 
could say of him, in writing an admiring and 
mournful epitaph: — 

** Beyond Virginia's border line 
His patriotism perished." 

The great collections of Civil War verse, which 
[7^] 



American Idealism 

are lying almost unread in the libraries, are store- 
houses of this ancient state pride and jealousy, 
which was absorbed so fatally into the larger 
sectional antagonism. " Maryland, my Mary- 
land" gave place to " Dixie," just as Whittier*s 
"Massachusetts to Virginia" was forgotten 
when marching men began to sing "John 
Brown's Body " and " The Battle Hymn of the 
Republic." The literature of sectionalism still 
lingers in its more lovable aspect in the verse 
and fiction which still celebrates the fairer side 
of the civilization of the Old South: its ideals 
of chivalry and local loyalty, its gracious women 
and gallant men. Our literature needs to cul- 
tivate this provincial affection for the past, as an 
offset to the barren uniformity which the fed- 
eral scheme allows. But the ultimate imagina- 
tive victory, like the actual political victory of 
the Civil War, is with the thought and feeling 
of Nationalism. It is foreshadowed in that pas- 
sionate lyric cry of Lowell, which sums up so 
much and, like all true passion, anticipates so 
much : — 

** O Beautiful! my Country!" 
The literary record of American idealism 
thus illustrates how deeply the conception of 

[73] 



American Idealism 

Nationalism has affected the imagination of 
our countrymen. The literary record of the 
American conception of liberty runs further 
back. Some historians have allowed them- 
selves to think that the American notion of 
liberty is essentially declamatory, a sort of fu- 
tile echo of Patrick Henry's " Give me Liberty 
or give me Death '* ; and not only declamatory, 
but hopelessly theoretical and abstract. They 
grant that It was a trumpet-note, no doubt, for 
agitators against the Stamp Act, and for pam- 
phleteers like Thomas Paine; that it may have 
been a torch for lighting dark and weary ways 
in the Revolutionary War; but they believe it 
likewise to be a torch which gleams with the 
fire caught from France and which was passed 
back to France in turn when her own great 
bonfire was ready for lighting. The facts, how- 
ever, are inconsistent with this picturesque 
theory of contemporary reactionists. It is true 
that the word " liberty '* has been full of tempt- 
ation for generations of American orators, that 
it has become an Idol of the forum, and often 
a source of heat rather than of light. But to 
treat American Liberty as If she habitually wore 
the red cap is to nourish a Francophobia as 

[74] 



American Idealism 

absurd as Edmund Burke's. The sober truth 
is that the American working theory of Lib- 
erty is singularly like St. Paul's. " Ye have been 
called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an 
occasion to the flesh." A few sentences from 
John Winthrop, written in 1645, are signifi- 
cant : " There is a twofold liberty, natural . . . 
and civil or federal. The first is common to 
man with beasts and other creatures. By this, 
man, as he stands in relation to man simply, 
hath liberty to do what he lists; it is a liberty 
to evil as well as to good. This liberty is incom- 
patible and inconsistent with authority. . . . 
The other kind of liberty I call civil or federal, 
it may also be termed moral. . . . This liberty 
is the proper end and object of authority, and 
cannot subsist without it; and it is a liberty to 
that only which is good, just, and honest. This 
liberty you are to stand for, with the hazard 
(not only of your goods, but) of your lives, if 
need be. . . . This liberty is maintained and 
exercised in a way of subjection to authority; 
it is of the same kind of liberty wherewith 
Christ hath made us free." 

There speaks the governor, the man of affairs, 
the typical citizen of the future republic. The 

[75] 



American Idealism 

liberty to do as one pleases is a dream of the 
Renaissance; but out of dreamland it does not 
work. Nobody, even in revolutionary France, 
imagines that it will work. Jefferson, who is pop- 
ularly supposed to derive his notion of liberty 
from French theorists, is to all practical pur- 
poses nearer to John Winthrop than he is to 
Rousseau. The splendid phrases of his " Decla- 
ration " are sometimes characterized as abstrac- 
tions. They are really generalizations from past 
political experience. An arbitrary king, assum- 
ing a liberty to do as he liked, had encroached 
upon the long-standing customs and authority 
of the colonists. Jefferson, at the bidding of the 
Continental Congress, served notice of the royal 
trespass, and incidentally produced (as Lincoln 
said) a "standard maxim for free society.'* 

It is true, no doubt, that the word "liberty " 
became in Jefferson's day, and later, a mere par- 
tisan or national shibboleth, standing for no 
reality, degraded to a catchword, a symbol of 
antagonism to Great Britain. In the political 
debates and the impressive prose and verse of 
the anti-slavery struggle, the word became once 
more charged with vital meaning; it glowed 
under the heat and pressure of an idea. Towards 

[76] 



American Idealism 

the end of the nineteenth century it went temp- 
orarily out of fashion. The late Colonel Hig- 
ginson, an ideal type of what Europeans call an 
" 1 848 " man, attended at the close of the cen- 
tury some sessions of the American Historical 
Association. In his own address, at the closing 
dinner, he remarked that there was one word for 
which he had listened in vain during the read- 
ing of the papers by the younger men. It was 
the word "liberty." One of the younger school 
retorted promptly that since we had the thing 
liberty, we had no need to glorify the word. 
But Colonel Higginson, stanch adherent as he 
was of the "good old cause," was not convinced. 
Like many another lover of American letters, 
he thought that William Vaughn Moody's 
" Ode in Time of Hesitation " deserved a place 
by the side of Lowell's " Commemoration 
Ode," and that when the ultimate day of reck- 
oning comes for the whole muddled Imperial- 
istic business, the standard of reckoning must 
be "liberty" as Winthrop and Jefferson and 
Lincoln and Lowell and Vaughn Moody un- 
derstood the word. 

In the mean time we must confess that the 
history of our literature, with a few noble excep- 

[77] 



American Idealism 

tions, shows a surprising defect in the passion for 
freedom. Tennyson's famouslinesabout"Free- 
dom broadening slowly down from precedent 
to precedent " are perfectly American in their 
conservative tone ; while it is Englishmen like 
Byron and Landor and Shelley and Swinburne 
who have written the most magnificent repub- 
lican poetry. The "land of the free" turns to 
the monarchic mother country, after all, for the 
glow and thunder and splendor of the poetry 
of freedom. It is one of the most curious phe- 
nomena in the history of literature. Shall we 
enter the preoccupation plea once more ? En- 
joying the thing liberty, have we been therefore 
less concerned with the idea? Or is it simply 
another illustration of the defective passion of 
American literature? 

Yet there is one phase of political loyalty 
which has been cherished by the imagination of 
Americans, and which has inspired noteworthy 
oratory and noble political prose. It is the sent- 
iment of Union. In one sense, of course, this 
dates back to the period of Franklin's bonmot 
about our all hanging together, or hanging sep- 
arately. It is found in Hamilton's pamphlets, 
in Paine's Crisis^ in the Federalist^ in Washing- 

[78] 



American Idealism 

ton's " Farewell Address.'* It is peculiarly as- 
sociated with the name and fame of Daniel Web- 
ster, and, to a less degree, with the career of 
Henry Clay. In the stress of the debate over 
slavery, many a Northerner with abolitionist 
convictions, like the majority of Southerners 
with slave-holding convictions, forgot the splen- 
did peroration of Webster's " Reply to Hay ne ** 
and were willing to "let the Union go." But 
in the four tragic and heroic years that followed 
the firing upon the American flag at Fort Sum- 
ter the sentiment of Union was made sacred by 
such sacrifices as the patriotic imagination of 
a Clay or a Webster had never dreamed. A new 
literature resulted. A lofty ideal of indisso- 
luble Union was preached in pulpits, pleaded 
for in editorials, sung in lyrics, and woven 
into the web of fiction. Edward Everett Hale's 
Man JVithout a Country became one of the 
most poignantly moving of American stories. 
In Walt Whitman's Drum-'Taps and his later 
poems, the " Union of these States " became 
transfigured with mystical significance: no long- 
er a mere political compact, dissoluble at will, 
but a spiritual entity, a new incarnation of the 
soul of man. 

[79 ] 



American Idealism 

We must deal later with that American in- 
stinct of fellowship which Whitman believed to 
have been finally cemented by the Civil War, 
and which has such import for the future of our 
democracy. There are likewise communal loy- 
alties, glowing with the new idealism which has 
come with the twentieth century: ethical, mun- 
icipal, industrial, and artistic movements which 
are fullofpromise for the higher lifeof the coun- 
try, but which have not yet had time to express 
themselves adequately in literature. There are 
stirrings of racial loyalty among this and that 
element of our composite population, — as for 
instance among the gifted younger generation 
of American Jews, — a racial loyalty not an- 
tagonistic to the American current of ideas, but 
rather in full unison with it. Internationalism 
itself furnishes motives for the activity of the 
noblest imaginations, and the true literature of 
internationalism has hardly yet begun. It is in 
the play and counterplay of these new forces 
that the American literature of the twentieth 
century must measure itself. Communal feel- 
ings novel to Americans bred under the ac- 
cepted individualism will doubtless assert them- 
selves in our prose and verse. But it is to be 
[80] 

V C 1.2 



American Idealism 

remembered that the best writing thus far pro- 
duced on American soil has been a result of the 
old conditions : of the old " Reverences '* ; of the 
pioneer training of mind and body; of the slow 
tempering of the American spirit into an obstin- 
ate idealism. We do not know what course the 
ship may take in the future, but 

•* We know what Master laid thy keel. 
What Workman wrought thy ribs of steel. 
Who made each mast and sail and rope. 
What anvil rang, what hammers beat. 
In what a forge and what a heat 
Were shaped the anchors of thy hope! " 



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